Spider-Touched

Twenty-three

ARAÑA. Her name whipped across Tir’s soul. Suddenly. Intensely. Making him rise from the chair so violently it crashed to the floor.

The force of his need to go to her refocused his fury, his terror at having translated the last of the glyphs and found no hint of how to free himself from the collar.

She was hurt. Dying.

Whatever bound them together, so often turning her emotions into his, was stretching, thinning, dissolving.

Regret swamped him. Hers morphing into his.

It was acute. Excruciating. Destroying.

The sense of loss drove him to his knees, the bookseller and shop fading away as if they no longer existed on the same physical plane he inhabited.

No! Tir screamed silently. Willing Araña healed as he’d willed the boy attacked by the chupacabra healed. Willing her whole, safely returned to him.

His scream of pain became one note among a thousand of them—jarring, discordant sounds creating an agony unlike any he’d known.

It lasted a lifetime and an instant.

Ended abruptly. Completely. As if the choice whether she lived or died was no longer in his power to change.

He rose to his feet. Shaky, swaying, empty of all emotion and thought, all awareness, until the bookseller’s movement brought him back to the present.

“Return the book to the safe. I have no further use of it,” Tir said as he hurried toward the door, toward the boat where Araña had said she’d wait for him.

“WAS revenge as sweet as you thought it would be, daughter? Was it worth the price you paid to gain it?”

The demon’s voice pulled Araña from blackness and into the same long corridor with its ever-changing tapestry where they’d met before. But unlike before, the threads were a vision seen through the shimmer of flames. They were like a reflection on water, there but not there, just as she was there but not there.

She was truly formless, her body an illusion created by her mind as it clung desperately to the memory of who she’d been.

Soon all vestiges of it would be burned away. She knew it as surely as she knew the demon behind her shouldn’t have been able to stop her descent into the fire.

It wasn’t the Hell she’d been threatened with and beat because of, or the place of eternal damnation and torment she’d been taught to fear, but the molten womb of the birthplace she’d dreamed about. And it held no terror for her, only the promise of rebirth.

Her soul had no place among the living, the proof of it was in front of her—in the fiery thread that extinguished in a flare of blue, as if in the instant of her death, when she’d called Tir’s name, he’d been aware of her passing and called her name as well.

Araña’s gaze lingered for only an instant before searching for the blue-black thread that was his. There was joy in not seeing it—in knowing the texts had contained the incantation to free him from the collar. But there was pain, too, intense regret at not having had a chance to say good-bye, to feel his body joined to hers one last time as they shared a final kiss, shared breath and spirit before being parted.

“Look further into the future if you want to see his life enter the weave again,” the demon said, and Araña obeyed, feeling the phantom tightening of her throat when she saw the thread enter the pattern. Disappearing and reappearing only when it was alongside another, this one jagged ice where hers had been flame.

“Is he free of the collar?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer by how closely the twining of the two threads mimicked the way hers had done with Tir’s.

“No. Perhaps his future companion will discover a way to free him. Perhaps not.”

Araña felt the sharp stab of jealousy, but still she asked, “How long until he has another chance at freedom?”

“Do you care so much? He’s the enemy of our kind. In all likelihood he would have killed you if he’d gained his freedom from the collar.”

Memories swelled up, swamping Araña in moments of tenderness and passion, companionship and possession, filling her with bitter-sweet emotion that she’d never experience any of it again with him. “He wouldn’t have.”

“You sound so sure, daughter. But once you would have sworn vengeance against him in the same way you did to honor the two human men you loved.”

“Never.”

Tir’s name was so thoroughly woven into her soul she knew she was incapable of killing him.

Her confidence was met with laughter. “Once you would have looked at the collar around his neck and viewed it as a victory by the House of the Scorpion. You would have celebrated Abijah en Rumjal’s accomplishment along with the rest of us.”

Shock sliced through Araña, as well as the faded remnants of terror. “The demon the maze owner commands?”

“He may well be demon by now,” came the cryptic reply. “He’s been bound to human will for thousands of years. He remembers all the deeds he’s been forced to perform along with what came before. If the collar is removed, our enemy will also remember our shared history.”

There was a roar, a sudden burst of air and power, like fuel added to fire, and it carried Araña to the past.

She recognized the imagery from the art history books Eric had cherished and she’d so often studied. Only instead of dreams captured in oil, scenes rising from the imagination of devoutly religious artists, instead of it being captured myth, she understood it was reality.

Men—mortal and those cast in supernatural light—fought side by side with angels, their faces resolute as they battled demons who looked like Abijah. Demons who bore images of spiders and serpents, cardinals and ravens, as well as scorpions on their skin—and others who looked fully human save for the marks that were a manifestation of their spirit’s nature.

“He thought of himself as a holy warrior,” the demon said. “It’s written that healing was the greatest of his talents, but he turned away from it, preferring to kill instead. And when he couldn’t kill, he saw us enslaved and held by humans. He lives because of alliances we’ve made with powers beyond The Prince’s domain. And because it’s fitting he endure the torment and horror he once so readily sentenced us to.”

Araña closed her eyes, unwilling to search out and witness Tir’s deeds even though the memory of it would soon be burned away. Whatever power the Spider demon used to hold her from the flames, it was weakening. She could feel the pull to leave.

“How long until he has another chance at freedom?”

“Three hundred years. Four hundred. The weave changes and the woman has yet to be born. She won’t be if we can prevent it. She wouldn’t serve our cause or pledge herself to The Prince as you would have.”

“I’d never bow to Satan.”

The demon laughed again. “That would be a terrible sight indeed. One of our kind—and a daughter of my House—bowing to the angel who is now the god’s adversary.”

The response startled Araña. She turned from the battlefield, and it faded away as if it had never been. In front of her stood the demon, dressed as it had been before, in concealing robes with only black eyes and a small strip of skin revealed.

A raven perched on the demon’s shoulder. And beyond both of them, a magnificent city rose, shimmering like a mirage, in an endless expanse of sand.

“This is the kingdom you were born to,” the demon said. “This is our paradise and refuge. Our prison set deep in the ghostlands.

“We are the children of Earth, the Djinn, given life from its fiery womb so we can protect it. But now we wait and plot, and dream in exile of one day being able to return and reclaim what is our birthright.”

“Djinn?” Araña asked, searching her mind, her memory, finding nothing though the word resonated within her.

“We existed long before the alien god arrived and thought to enslave us and give us over to his mud creations as familiars. When we resisted, the god forced The Prince into the image Abijah showed you and named him demon.

“The Prince was the first to be called by that name, but it’s come to serve us well. In the millennia since then, the humans have followed the example of their god.

“They’ve conjured up thousands of nightmare creatures and named them demon. And along with their wars and their false prophets, knowledge of us has disappeared from human memory and history. They no longer remember how we once walked among them, able to take no form as freely as we could take any form.”

The shimmering, beautiful city began to disappear, its buildings consumed by translucent flames. And like the candles burning in the witches’ circle, Araña knew time was running out. The roar and pull of the primordial fire was growing stronger, harder to resist—or want to resist.

“I grieved the first time I witnessed your death,” the de—the Spider Djinn said. “This time, as I stood in front of the tapestry and watched the outcome of your human choice, my anguish was tempered by the knowledge a Raven would soon follow you into the fire, and you would be reborn among us.

“I didn’t know then that you’d touched your lips to those of our enemy and, in doing so, shared breath and bound a part of yourself to him. In the moment your spirit was freed, he used his greatest gift to heal and preserve the human shell you’ve been tethered to.

“Because it was a vessel created for you, the Raven can guide your spirit back to it and you will live again among those who’ve feared and hurt you.

“Or the ties binding you to our enemy will burn away in the fire and you can once again walk among your kind, in our kingdom.

“By The Prince’s will, it is your choice.”

Live for all of us.

Matthew’s words found her, holding within them the love that had sustained her and the only home her heart had known—until Tir.

Memories of Tir made the decision easy. Thoughts of how she’d found him in the trapper’s truck, shackled and tethered to a chair, and how earlier in the day he’d healed a human child when there was nothing to be gained from it.

If she’d once lived for vengeance, she realized now its price could be too high to pay. And if she and Tir had once been enemies, she’d learned that the past might be better put aside and a different future forged.

“I want to go back to him,” she said.

The pitch black eyes of the Spider Djinn who claimed to be her mother showed no emotion. “As you will,” she said. “But know this. If you betray us by speaking of us or revealing our existence, The Prince will send assassins belonging to the Scorpion House and they won’t fail him. He will order your name struck from the books of our kind and those of the Raven’s House will be forbidden from ever returning you to us.”

“I understand.”

“Then the choice is made. Perhaps you will still come to serve us as you were meant to. Use your gifts wisely. Use all of them.”

“Will you continue to teach me?”

“Perhaps, daughter. Call my name when you next enter the Spider’s realm. I am Malahel.”

Araña understood, as she hadn’t before, that from the moment she’d climbed onto the Constellation and seen the unnamed port city in her vision, she’d been meant to come to Oakland and encounter Abijah and Tir.

“Why don’t you free Abijah?”

“The human he’s bound to is one we can’t touch, not from our prison, and not while he refuses to leave the one he created for himself with the maze.”

“And Abijah, why doesn’t he kill Anton?”

Malahel shuddered. “Doing so would make him ifrit. One whose name can no longer be spoken out loud and whose spirit can’t be guided back and reborn into a new life.”

“Will he be freed if I kill Anton?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

If the Spider Djinn cared at all about Abijah’s fate, it wasn’t reflected in either answer or voice.

Araña could feel how little time she had left before the choice she’d made would no longer matter against the consuming nature of fire. “Will you tell me how to free Tir?”

The raven stirred, ruffling its feathers.

Malahel turned her face toward it, and something passed between them before the Spider Djinn’s attention returned to Araña. “Abijah knows the incantation. You have his name. If the maze owner is dead, and the moment right, you can gain the information you desire.”

“I can’t speak in the language Anton uses.”

“His use of it is a conceit.”

The last of the kingdom city behind Spider and Raven went up in flames with a whoosh that engulfed everything—burning away moment and scene like a match put to paper—turning reality into a rush of heat and the hungry song of the fire, then nothingness until Araña opened her eyes to descending nightfall seen through a canopy of trees.

The stench of death surrounded her. Blood and feces and urine.

Goose bumps pimpled her skin, making her realize how cold she was.

Her shirt was soaked in blood, both hers and her enemies’.

But the Dji—Malahel hadn’t lied. She was whole. Healed. Strong.

Araña found her knives among scattered bones and leaves. She got to her feet, sheathing them, taking a last look at Jurgen and the Were.

The soft sound of sobbing and whispered prayers reached her. She retraced her earlier steps, going to the place where the remaining guardsman, Salim, who she knew only from the vision she’d changed with her visit to the witches’ house, cried in a cocoon of silk. There were twenty or thirty spiders around him, protecting their prey as others scurried along the branches on either side of the path, anchoring the threads that would allow them to lift their meal and suspend it where other predators couldn’t get it.

The spiders let her approach, parting to create a path through their midst, those displaced climbing onto the cocoon.

Perhaps he deserved this fate. Perhaps he didn’t. But Araña couldn’t walk away and leave him to die slowly.

She drew the knife, and the spiders converged on him, completely covering him. They lifted the front part of their bodies, telling her by their action they would protect their prize even from her.

Use your gifts wisely. Use all of them.

If there’d been fire here, she could have used it as a weapon. But in doing it, she would have betrayed a gift of trust, a birthright forged for her in the womb of Earth’s fire, where her nature was chosen.

Instinctively she willed the mark to her hand, then concentrated on the spiders, asking them with pictures if they’d let her cut away the silky threads of the cocoon.

They answered with movement, parting again but only enough to reveal a small patch of silk above the guardsman’s heart.

His fate was out of her hands. But she could grant him mercy.

Araña drove the knife in, accepting the spiders’ offering.

Then she turned away, racing the nightfall and hurrying toward the Constellation — and Tir.

THE scent of blood made Tir’s heart stop beating for an instant as he entered the boat’s cabin.

The air was heavy with it.

Were.

Human.

Araña’s.

She was safe. Alive.

The sound of the shower was testament to it. The way terror had morphed into relief as he ran, making him stumble and nearly fall, had told him, but until he saw her, held her…

A faucet was turned and the water stopped. A moment later, the door separating them opened.

She was naked. Beautiful. Her skin glistening, as if she’d known he was waiting and been in such a hurry to get to him that she had only allowed herself a cursory sweep of the towel over wet flesh.

Dark, dark eyes consumed him and made him burn as though he’d stepped into the heart of a primal fire.

He shed his clothes without being aware of doing it. Closed the distance between them, helpless against his need to hold her, to touch his skin to hers.

“Love me,” she whispered. Command and plea. Inescapable desire stripping away any thought he might have other than to obey.

Tir lifted her into his arms, his mouth against hers, their tongues rubbing and twining in carnal bliss, in a ravenous joining of breath and soul.

His cock strained upward toward her, licking across his belly as each step toward the bed brushed the wet tip of it across his abdomen.

It was more than lust. More than the sating of physical desire.

If he’d lost her…

Her fingers touched the collar enslaving him, transmitting regret. Worry for him. Fear only barely masking a deeper terror.

“Don’t,” he said against her lips, wanting to lose himself in her, to become a willing prisoner to the passion that eradicated all reality other than the touch of flesh to flesh, soul to soul.

Tir placed her on the mattress and followed her down, no longer content to taste only her lips. He trailed wet, hungry kisses to her breast and reveled in the way her back arched, thrusting hardened nipples against his mouth, her body begging for him to suckle with the same fervor her words did.

He laved. Bit. Sucked. And grew more aroused as she writhed, pressing her heated cunt to his belly, adding her honeyed arousal to his own.

She cried out when he left her breast and kissed downward. But when he lifted his head after tormenting her with the shallow thrusting of his tongue into her navel, he erred in underestimating her, in forgetting how ruthless a warrior she was in her own right.

“I want to put my mouth on you at the same time,” she said, wriggling out from under him, making his hips buck. The erotic images suddenly bombarding him hardened his cock further, leaving his testicles burning with the need for release.

Savage, feral determination swept through him when she would have pushed him to his back and taken the dominant position, crawling down his body and tormenting him before pleasuring him.

He grabbed her and pulled her underneath him, not allowing her to linger over his chest or nipples, not allowing her to tease. His forearms pinned her thighs to the mattress, holding her open so he could breathe her in, savor the sight of her glistening folds.

Even as he watched, the color of her aroused flesh darkened, beckoned. And it was all he could do to resist its call. He’d be lost as soon as he buried his face against her cunt, helpless against anything she wanted of him.

“Now, Araña,” he said, commanding rather than begging, forcing steel into his spine as her lips and tongue found his cock.

Pleasure rippled through Araña, his so easily becoming hers as she willingly obeyed him by pressing her mouth to his rigid penis and measuring its length with kisses and sinuous rubs of her tongue against hardened flesh.

Tir was everything to her. Unlike the truth of the spider mark, it hadn’t taken death for her to accept how important he was to her. Part of her had known from the very first, in the heart of the flame when she’d touched the strand of her life to his.

There’d never been any other choice for her but to fall in love with him, to need only his touch, crave it with a desperation that made it easy to turn away from the promise of power and a home among the Djinn.

His cock pulsed, wept for her just as her cunt throbbed and cried for him. She wanted him, ached for all of him, his body as well as his heart, his present as well as his future.

Fear clawed at her, but she forced it away, refusing to consider what lay ahead just as she’d refused to seek his image among those battling and slaughtering her kind in a past mankind no longer remembered.

His hips bucked when she took him into her mouth. She sucked, only to stop and once again tease along his length with her lips and tongue and teeth, fighting against taking him completely until he touched her in the same way.

Each lash was erotic agony. Each caress a test of Tir’s strength and resolve.

Death had come for her in a heartbeat, and for a while, as he ran, he’d thought it had taken her. Now he wanted to savor his victory over it. He wanted to hold her beneath him and soak in the heat of her, to fill himself with her cries of pleasure, with the taste and scent and essence of her.

But he was powerless against the punishing ecstasy of lips and tongue and teeth on his cock. He couldn’t resist her pleading with him to love her by putting his mouth on her.

Tir relented and lowered his lips to her heated flesh. He took her erect clit and thrilled at the way her hips jerked, bucked as she fucked the tiny organ into his mouth in the same rhythm as his cock slid into hers.

Satisfaction buffered the raw edge of his passion—until she swallowed, taking him deeper, sucking him harder.

With a growl he left her clit. He lapped his tongue through the silky moisture of her slit, plunged it hard and deep between her swollen cunt lips.

The bond that sent her emotions swirling into him, that had nearly destroyed his sanity in the moment she almost died, allowed him to feel her pleasure, the ecstasy she found in his touch— only his touch.

He wouldn’t part with her. Couldn’t. Even the thought of it burned away what remained of his control.

Tir fucked her with his tongue. Shoved it into her tight channel as he held her open, his cock doing the same to her mouth. And even when she came, it wasn’t enough of a claiming.

He pulled from her mouth before he spewed his seed. He forced her onto her elbows and knees, though she went willingly, provocatively spreading her thighs, offering herself to him, feeding a bestial urge to mate.

He covered her. Thrust into her.

Rutted like the stud his captors had so often tried to make of him. Her moans and panted pleas sent him into a frenzy. Had him convulsing in exquisite victory as jets of semen rushed through his cock in a lava-hot rush to her womb.

He wouldn’t lose her again. Now and forever, she was his.

Tir collapsed, his arms locking her to him, holding her back to his chest as his penis remained inside her, trapping his seed in her sultry depths. She shivered against him, but he knew it was in pleasure, in reaction to the intensity of their lovemaking.

He pressed a kiss to her shoulder, her neck. A question forced its way through the aftermath of desire. “What happened?”

She shivered again. And this time he knew she was remembering. Fear tried to chase away the heated remnants of lust. He tugged a blanket over them.

“What happened?” Tir repeated, his arms tightening around Araña in a silent warning he wouldn’t let her avoid his question.

Araña closed her eyes, savoring the heat of Tir’s body, the protective, possessive feel of his arms around her, the intimacy of having his cock still lodged inside her.

What should she tell him? What could she tell him?

Nothing about the Djinn. She didn’t doubt The Prince would send Scorpion assassins as terrifying and deadly as Abijah if she spoke about her kind.

“I led the guardsman who sold me to the maze into a copse of trees near where I escaped from it. He was with two others. Another guardsman and the Were from the trapper’s truck.”

“Raoul,” Tir growled. “They’re dead?”

“Yes.” She delayed the moment when they would need to talk about going into Anton’s house by rubbing her palm over the tattoos on his arm. “What do the glyphs mean?”

“They’re prayers to use with my blood.”

She heard the savage anger in Tir’s voice. “For healing?”

“Yes.”

She ached to tell him Abijah held the key to freeing him from the collar. But just as she couldn’t tell him what she’d learned of her own heritage, she feared what he would do with the knowledge.

Abijah might be bound, but he was no less powerful or deadly for it, while Tir was vulnerable. Fear stuttered through her chest as she thought about what tomorrow would bring— and the choice awaiting her if they managed to get into the maze and then into Anton’s house.

Malahel’s warnings whispered through her mind, along with the words Tir had spoken before they’d come to Oakland. Keep your secrets as long as they don’t involve me. But remember this, if I find they make you my enemy, not even the sweet temptation of your body will save you from my vengeance.

Araña took a steadying breath and forged ahead with the plan she hoped would lead to Tir’s freedom without putting him in the path of the Djinn who’d enslaved him. “When I was held at the maze, Anton summoned the demon and ordered him to bring me to the front of the cage. The demon didn’t move to obey and Anton commanded him again, in a language I didn’t understand.

“It made me realize the demon wasn’t a willing participant in the maze. Later the demon refused to answer a question until Anton repeated it three times. When he did answer it, Anton’s assistant Farold suggested a caveat be added to whatever command the demon has to obey when it comes to those running the maze. He suggested the demon be told not to intentionally kill me unless I was escaping the maze. If I’m breaking in, and the demon sees an opportunity to be free if I can kill Anton—”

“Don’t think you’re going in alone.”

“It’s our best chance.”

His teeth found her shoulder and administered a rebuke. “If I thought you’d agree to leaving Oakland and forgetting your promise to the vampires, I’d force myself out of the tight heaven of your channel and head for the bay and open waters right now.”

There was an edge of truth in Tir’s comment, as if he’d contemplated forcing her to leave. “I can’t,” she said, the image of Erik and Matthew rising from the black sea of the ghostlands pressing in on her.

Araña entwined her fingers with Tir’s and regrouped, her heart racing as she remembered the hungry pull of the flames, the desire to reunite with them and the shimmering promise of the Djinn Kingdom.

“I was dying,” she said. “You saved me. You healed me.”

Tir’s fingers tightened on hers. “And promised myself that from now on I wouldn’t let my vigilance waver, even for a moment. You’re so very mortal. So vulnerable. A blink and you could be gone from my life forever.”

Her heart thundered in her chest at what his words implied. She turned in his arms, putting aside the need to convince him to let her face Abijah alone, at least for the moment.

Araña smiled when Tir grunted in protest at having his cock forced from her body. Even now, after all they’d done together, she found him too beautiful to look at and yet so enthralling she couldn’t look away. He was masculine perfection, the epitome of unfathomable power.

If he remembered his past, would he look on her with hatred and revulsion? Would he regret touching her, lying with her?

A fist squeezed her heart, sending pain spiking through her chest at the thought of losing him. She refused to believe he would kill her if he learned she was Djinn, but she couldn’t stop herself from stroking a fingertip over the collar.

“I nearly died today in my hunger for revenge. If I asked it of you, would you turn away from seeking vengeance against the one who put this on you?”

“Don’t ask it of me,” he warned.

“I can’t promise I won’t.”

And because she wanted him to have the words, she added, “I love you.”

Tir rolled so she was underneath him, his cock once again buried deep in her heated channel. Her emotions flowed into him, fierce and aching, compelling. Devastating in their intensity. He touched his lips to hers, whispered against her mouth as his hips moved, beginning a slow climb to shared ecstasy. “Love doesn’t begin to encompass all I feel for you.”